On Aug 26, 11:01 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 22 Aug 2011, at 22:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Aug 22, 1:56 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> On 21 Aug 2011, at 15:28, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> >>>> My point is that, by definition of philosophical zombie, they
> >>>> behave
> >>>> like normal and sane human being. It is not walking coma, or
> >>>> catatonic
> >>>> behavior. It is full human behavior. A zombie might write a book on
> >>>> consciousness, or have a diary of his dreams reports.
>
> >>> A movie can feature an actress writing a book on consciousness or
> >>> doing anything else that can be demonstrated audiovisually. How is
> >>> that not a zombie?
>
> >> The movie lack the counterfactual. If the public shout "don't go the
> >> cave!" to the heroine in a thriller, she will not listen.
>
> > That can be obscured by making the movie ambiguous. Having the actors
> > suddenly look in the camera and say something like "Did you say
> > something? We can't hear you very well in here." When the tension
> > builds the heroine could say to the camera "I know what you're
> > thinking, but I'm going in anyways". I think if you give the movie
> > anywhere near the latitude you are giving to arithmetic, you'll see
> > that the threshold between a movie and a UM is much less than between
> > a living organism and a silicon chip. You can make movies interactive
> > with alternate story lines that an audience can vote on, or just
> > pseudointeractive:
> > http://listverse.com/2011/05/24/top-10-william-castle-film-gimmicks/
> > (#1)
>
> If the movie is so much interactive then, it is no more a movie, but a
> virtual reality. If the entities behave like humans for a long time
> enough, I will attribute them consciousness.

Advertising

That's where I think you are being too promiscuous with consciousness
attribution. To me it wouldn't matter how long it takes for me to
figure out that it wasn't conscious, once I found out that it was only
an interactive movie, I would not continue to extend the presumption
that the movie itself is conscious.
This thought experiment brings out a relevant detail though in the
idea of ventriloquism. Even if a ventriloquist is the best possible
ventriloquist, I still do not think that we should attribute
consciousness to the dummy (certain horror movies notwithstanding).
It's ok to informally group them together as one, since that's how
motive works - it's insistence can be read through a prosthetic
puppet, mask, cartoon, work of art, etc. If we can read the text, then
we can be influenced by the sender's intent. This is the case with
software. It is a way for the intelligence of the programmer and
groups of programmers to enact their ideas in the form of a machine.
Most of the time, it makes no difference to conflate a ventriloquists
intelligence with the character they use to impersonate the dummy, the
two of them together could be thought of as a single ventriloquist act
- but if we are talking about a dummy being it's own ventriloquist,
then we are looking at a completely different phenomenon. We watch a
movie and relate to it as a vicarious human experience - actors and
their actions rather than frames of pixels or film.
I could see how you could choose to see a sufficiently interactive
film as being practically indistinguishable from a 3p perspective, but
I don't see how you could assume that a corresponding 1p experience
arises spontaneously. Where? The film? The electronics? The program?
It's metaphysical and crazy. My view is crystal clear. The programmers
sense and motives are sent through the medium of the theatrical
experience to the audience, who receive it as human sense and motive.
The text rides on the back of the many electronic production devices
and perceptual organs of the viewers, but it is not interpreted by
those media at all. No matter how much music you listen to on your
iPod, it's never going to intentionally compose it's own songs. The
movie doesn't learn to act, and the computer doesn't learn to feel
either. They have their own perceptual frames to contend with. The
iPod and the computer need to gratify their semiconductor circuits.
The movie reel needs to spin, the motor needs to keep cycling, the
film strip needs to keep falling into the sprockets, etc. They don't
have any appreciation of the contents which we find significant. I
think there's a tragic gender relation metaphor in there somewhere.
Something about what boys and girls find attractive in each other not
being similar to what they value in themselves.
>
>
>
> >> Zombie are
> >> different, they behave like you and me. By definition of
> >> philosophical
> >> zombie, you can't distinguish it from a "real human". You can
> >> distinguish a human from filmed human, all right?
>
> > Not without breaking the frame of reference. I can't distinguish a
> > live TV broadcast from a recorded broadcast. It's an audiovisual only
> > frame of reference. To postulate a philosophical zombie, you are
> > saying that nothing about them can be distinguished from a genuine
> > person, which is tautological. If nothing can be distinguished by
> > anyone or any thing at any time, then it is the genuine person, by
> > definition.
>
> Not at all. I can conceptually imagine them without having
> consciousness "by definition". Of course with comp this lead to non
> sense, given that consciousness is not attached to any body, but only
> to soul living in Platonia. In comp we don't have a mind body problem,
> only a problem of illusion of bodies.
Sure we can imagine that a p-zombie could exist, but that's only
because consciousness is private to begin with. It's a little harder
if you try to imagine yourself as a first person p-zombie. Why can't
Platonia just be right here? Inside of everything, just as we seem to
be inside of our experience of our body.
> > You're just saying 'an apple that is genuine in every possible way,
> > except that it's an orange' and using that argument to say 'then
> > apples can be no different than oranges in any meaningful way and
> > there is no reason why apples cannot be used to make an orange as long
> > as the substitution level is low enough.' The fallacy is that it uses
> > semantics of false exclusion to justify false inclusion. By insisting
> > that my protests that apples and oranges are both fruit but oranges
> > can never be made of apples is just an appeal to the false assumption
> > of substitution level, you disregard any possibility of seeing the
> > simple truth of the relation.
>
> I don't disregard that possibility, but comp explains much more. You
> need the applen and the orange, and non comprehensible link. I need
> only the apple (to change a bit your analogy).
Why isn't it comprehensible? I'm saying that the apple is an inside
out orange, and if you are an apple, then everything looks to you like
a universe of oranges with an apple shaped hole in it. That's the
link. Completely comprehensible to me.
To say that comp explains much more because it calls oranges apples I
think is a just-so story. It uses the ontologically primitive privacy
of subjectivity as a curtain to hide the emptiness of the purely
quantitative approach. Since we can't tell from the outside if any of
the oranges we see are apples on the inside, then comp just assumes
that they all do. I'm saying that there's nothing inherently apple
like about the ontology of interiority, and in fact all of our
experience thus far with AGI has indicated that the interior of a
silicon orange is nothing like an apple or any kind of fruit. Maybe
it's like a poppy seed.
> >>> If you make it a 3D-hologram of an actress, with
> >>> odorama and VR touchback tactile interfaces, then is it a zombie? If
> >>> you connect this thing up to a GPS instead of a cinematically
> >>> scripted
> >>> liturgy and put it in an information kiosk, does it become a zombie
> >>> then? I don't see much of a difference.
>
> >> Behaviorally they have no difference with human. Conceptually they
> >> are
> >> quite different, because they lack consciousness and any private
> >> experiences.
> >> With comp, such zombies are non sensical, or trivial. Consciousness
> >> is
> >> related to the abstract relations involved in the most probable
> >> computations leading to your actual 3-states.
>
> > Yes, zombies are non sensical or trivial.
>
> >>> It's still just a facade which
> >>> reflects our human sense rather than the sense of an autonomous
> >>> logic
> >>> which transcends programming. Even if it's really fancy programming,
> >>> it's experience has no connection with us. It's a cypher that only
> >>> intersects our awareness through it's rear end, upon which we have
> >>> drawn a face.
>
> >>>>>> That is an advantage. Precise and hypothetical. Refutable.
>
> >>>>> True, but it has disadvantages as well. Dissociated and clinical.
>
> >>>> So you say.
>
> >>>>> Meaningless. (cue 'Supertramp - The Logical Song')
>
> >>>> So you say.
>
> >>> Right. These qualities cannot be proved from 3-p. Meaning and
> >>> feeling
> >>> are not literal and existential. If they don't insist for you, then
> >>> you don't feel them.
>
> >>>>>>> Sense contingent upon the theoretical existence
> >>>>>>> of numbers (or the concrete existence of what unknowable
> >>>>>>> phenomenon is
> >>>>>>> represented theoretically as numbers)
>
> >>>>>> Mathematician can study the effect of set of unknowable things.
> >>>>>> That
> >>>>>> is the beauty of what LUMs discover inside their "head", not
> >>>>>> just a
> >>>>>> big Ignorance, but that the Ignorance has a topology, a
> >>>>>> geometry, a
> >>>>>> lot of unexpected feature.
>
> >>>>> Hopefully it isn't an unfathomably malignant and cunning evil
> >>>>> seeking
> >>>>> to evacuate the souls of unsuspecting scientists who are all too
> >>>>> willing to trade their humanity for a chance to peek into an abyss
> >>>>> of
> >>>>> empty calculation from which there is no escape. ;)
>
> >>>> Comp does the contary of evacuating soul. It reinstall soul in
> >>>> arithmetic, in a precise and testable way.
>
> >>> I'm ok with that, but I think that it's not a universal soul, it's
> >>> just the wireframe map of the logic of soul.
>
> >> So, you are not OK with that.
>
> > No, I am ok with numbers having soul, it's just an arithmetic soul,
> > not a universal soul.
>
> Sepulveda again. ---I can admit that indians have souls, but of a
> different nature.
Again, Sepulveda was denying the humanity of humans who were
discovered living on Earth, not learned abstract representations of
counting. The soul of a number depends entirely on what is doing the
counting, but it will always be inherently arithmetic compared to
other kinds of sense. It's not universal, just as plastic isn't
anything but plastic even though it can simulate woodgrain, cotton,
glass, etc. We develop better processes to make more aesthetically
pleasing fabrics and materials, but it always has more synthetic
feeling qualities than genuine materials. It's very ability to
impersonate anything makes it recognizable as a universal imitation.
CGI animation reveals the same thing - even though it makes a more
sophisticated looking representation of reality, it always has nothing
behind the eyes. Everything moves in slick gliding surreality where
nothing ever seems to gain tangible traction. It's just a cartoon.
> >>>>> This is sort of a picture of
> >>>>> thatt:http://stationlink.com/art/comp_witchdoctor.jpg
>
> >>>> Don't confuse a theory with the popular human perceptions of that
> >>>> theory, especially in a context where a form of obscurantism
> >>>> prevails
> >>>> since a long time.
>
> >>> That picture is more of an oracle. I discovered it in the mural I
> >>> did
> >>> by mirroring the far Occidental side. It was unintentional, but I
> >>> think it communicates something about the dangers of computational
> >>> extremism. To me anyways.
>
> >> That's fear selling.
> >> Extremism is prevented by the fact that the comp ethic is the right
> >> to
> >> say "no" to the doctor. There are dangers, but that is a a reason to
> >> study it, not to make it schedule 1.
>
> > I'm all for studying it and for consenting adults enjoying the
> > results,
>
> OK, nice.
>
> > but I think there are other options too.
>
> Comp proves that there are other options. The comp ethics is provably
> the right to say "no" to the doctor, at any level.
> In the long run, computationalist will be those living earth through
> EM waves. With some luck, earth will be a museum of the carbon era.
I think that transhumanism is potentially realizable but not through
EM waves alone (because I don't think that they exist by themselves).
It's going to take computation plus nanotech to deliver immortal cells
that we can maybe be be gradually walked onto from our brains and
share the intergalactic world-sim. I wouldn't be surprised if we found
at that point that we are recreating ourselves in the past and that
the only thing people want to do after a while is use the sim to
forget about the sim and trap themselves on some planet for one brief
lifetime after another...
Craig
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.